The RIMdev logo story or a tale of 2 knights

One of my early challenges at RIMdev was to create a RIMdev logo. Something that worked with the existing RitterIM knight, but also let us stand out as the development department. Something that our entire team could get behind and have fun with. Challenge accepted.

Starting with the existing Ritter icon, the one that had been with Ritter Insurance Marketing since it’s inception, what could be done to evolve/adapt it to our team of polyglots?

First, there was the horse itself, representing a knight on a chessboard. A strong chess piece, one of action and diversity of movement. Early development strengthened the knight, but didn’t encapsulate code as well. Toggle the onion skin view below or view on codepen.

Toggle onion skin

Enter the trite. Sorry, while curly braces embody the definition, they do incorporate code. On their own, they didn’t offer balance with this new knight. A pedestal was added to both elevate and balance the knight within its circle (swag was a driving consideration throughout the design. A symbol and logo that would look great on stickers, t-shirts, whatever).

We’ve had some fun with it since then. 2016 saw the introduction of the initial logo, a Slackbot (a.k.a. RIMbot), a major refactor for one of our applications, and a cup of coffee (OSS brew).